Mini dossier: War, occupation, and culture: arts, heritage, and İstanbul, 1918–1923

Crowds plunge from the heights of Pera [in Constantinople], rush down like gigantic ants and scatter in all directions. Life opens up under the sun like an enormous wound adorned with precious stones (Zarian 1981 [1926–1928]). ¹

Soon after the end of World War I, the Armenian poet and writer Gostan Zarian returned to İstanbul. Zarian was not born in the Ottoman Empire; he was the son of a general in the Russian Army, previously a political exile in Europe under the tsarist regime, and a friend of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Zarian was familiar with İstanbul, having been there a few times before; the last just before the outbreak of World War I, when he had been a founding editor of the Armenian-language avant-garde literary journal Mehian [Pagan Temple], later losing most of his then collaborators in the Armenian Genocide (Baliozian 1981, xi [see Zarian 1981]; Moskofian 2017). When he returned to the city in 1919, it was as a special correspondent covering news about Armenia and the Middle East for an Italian newspaper. His memoir of that time imagined his experiences of the city as “precious stones” nestling in the “enormous wound” that life seemed to have become. Zarian was one of many in whose memory occupied İstanbul left a lasting mark. The testimonies of the city’s long-term and temporary residents scattered, like their authors, as far as America, Russia, Greece, Armenia, and elsewhere (among others, see Adıvar 1928; Patrick 1930; Gritchenko 1930; Theotokas 1940; Anaïs 1949). ² For a long time, these stories and people did not feature prominently in later history books about the period, which often reduced them to enemy combatants or saw the events in İstanbul as, at best, sideshows in historical accounts of the “great” men and deeds in Ankara, Athens, London, and other places touched by World War I.

On October 30, 1918, the Armistice of Mudros officially marked the end of the Empire’s involvement and defeat in World War I. Yet, for the Ottomans, the guns did not fall silent. On October 13, a convoy of British, French, Italian, and Greek warships reached İstanbul, commencing a period of occupations of remaining Ottoman territory, while conflict raged across Anatolia until 1923 and the wider Middle East long after. During this time, in political terms, the representatives of the Allied countries wielded more power than the reigning Sultan, Mehmed VI Vahideddin (r. 1918–1922). The experience of the residents of İstanbul was in this sense unique; this was the only major capital to experience enemy occupation at the end of World War I, and its future and theirs remained highly uncertain between 1918 and 1923.

In the Republican Turkey inaugurated in 1923, occupied İstanbul was largely ignored in official history writing, which predominantly lionized the events of the War of Independence in Anatolia and the role played by Mustafa Kemal in particular. In Armenia and Greece, historiographies of the period were dominated by the trauma of events defined as the Armenian Genocide and the Asia Minor Catastrophe, respectively. In histories written in the former occupying powers, Britain and France in particular, the colonial ambitions of the Allies in İstanbul and Anatolia were conveniently forgotten, and their strategic and diplomatic goals for the wider Middle East were emphasized instead (MacArthur Seal and Tongo 2022b, 92). For Britain, most of all, the Treaty of Lausanne and the withdrawal of military forces from İstanbul in October 1923 marked the end of what Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal has termed “Britain’s Levantine Empire” – “a new imperium” the British military attempted to construct between 1914 and 1923 in the eastern Mediterranean, including the city of İstanbul (MacArthur-Seal 2021). The partnerships established between the Republic of Turkey and the former Allied powers from 1923 onwards (Oran 2001; Barlas and Gülmez 2018) also eclipsed the history of İstanbul’s occupation in favor of these diplomatic relations, and strategic silences eventually led to cultural amnesia. The groundbreaking works in the early 1990s by Stéphane Yerasimos (1992) and Nur Bilge Criss (1993) remained for too long the only two exceptions in this historiographical lacuna.

More recently, the centenaries of pivotal events in the final decade of the Empire – the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), World War I (1914–1918), and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) – have provided an opportunity to reshape the historiographical landscape. Recently published studies have restored occupied İstanbul to the place it deserves in both the history of modern Turkey and European imperialism. ³ Moreover, in order to recover the texture of events that have been lost in the folds of official history, social and cultural sources previously overlooked as insignificant or avoided as too subjectively tinted, including poems, postcards, paintings, medals, songs, memorabilia, and artworks, have become the objects of this historical research, for the history of both World War I (Eldem 2004, 2020; Köroğlu 2007; Öztuncay 2014; Akın 2018; Tongo 2018, 2019) and İstanbul’s occupation (Woodall 2010; MacArthur-Seal 2017; Güler 2020; Abi 2022, 2023; Ercan Kydonakis 2022; Aygün 2024).

With this special issue, we aim to contribute to this growing scholarship on the cultural history of the late Empire. The post-Armistice occupations raise a series of important and interesting questions about the different social and cultural relations and interactions between occupiers and occupied and their various attempts at rule, resistance, collaboration, and solidarity. As Jay Winter (2024) has emphasized regarding occupied İstanbul, the colonial framework within which the cultural history of the period unfolded was “transnational in practice.” Culture was one of the many means the Allies used to impose power and authority over Ottoman society, as well as over the various populations who sought refuge in Ottoman lands from conflicts in the wider region. But, rather than a one-way project of active Western domination over a non-Western “Other” defined as passive or culturally immature, as Edward Said characterized Orientalism (Said 1978), culture and power in occupied Ottoman lands can be understood as entangled in more reciprocal encounters and dialogue. While the occupiers certainly exercised their authority over the occupied in the cultural realm, the occupied also used the established urban and cultural fabric of the Ottoman capital to confront and transform it. The following are some of the questions we have attempted to answer in this special issue: How did the war and occupation influence cultural production and cultural heritage policies? How did the symbols and meanings embedded in these artworks, artefacts, and buildings reflect and influence Ottoman societal norms and the colonial framework of the occupations? How did power relations and hegemonies shape cultural practices, representations, and individuals’ everyday lives and to what extent did individual actors, in response, create and manifest their own cultural practices within or in contrast to those of the dominant power structures? And why were certain cultural forms and practices forgotten while others remained residual?

One way of thinking towards what unifies the theoretical approach of the contributions to this special issue is, as Jay Winter (2024) suggests in his postscript, an affinity with Raymond Williams’s (1961) theory of culture. The articles analyze how the various forms of cultural practice, including visual arts, music, heritage, architecture, values, beliefs, rituals, and symbols, were produced, disseminated, and received to recover what Williams defined – and Winter emphasized – as a “structure of feeling” of living under occupation (Williams 1961; Winter 2024). For Williams, a “structure of feeling”

… is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance (Williams 1961, 48).

Williams was not what we have come to call a cultural historian, ⁴ yet his elaboration of the concept of “structure of feeling” and approach to culture “as a whole way of life” was adopted by historians, especially by the pioneers of “history from below,” including EP Thompson (Thompson 1963, 116, 194; Middleton 2020). The reason why Williams preferred the term “feeling” over other more formal concepts like “ideology” or “world-view” was that he was “concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relationships between these” (Williams 1977, 132). Likewise, the articles here focus on the existing and emerging meanings and values lived and felt by artists, scholars, and museum directors during the military, political, and social realities of occupation. The authors analyze culture as an active part of these social relations, rather than their mere reflections (Williams 1961, 45–46), and address the agency of individuals in creating, shaping, and changing prevailing cultural values and meanings.

The Armistice era provides a fascinating case study to explore different historical actors’ relationships and intersections (top-down and bottom-up; local and international) and to address the complex, dynamic, and multifaceted cultural practices, repertoires, and spaces in occupied İstanbul. İstanbul was a cross-roads city where cultures, languages, and ideas converged and often conflicted with each other. The newly arrived servicemen of the Allies, including from their colonies, together with refugees and migrants from Russia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Europe and beyond, joined the already multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural global city that was İstanbul. The Allied powers, successive Ottoman cabinets, and the government in Ankara clashed over not only the sovereignty of the city, but also over its everyday and cultural life. Just one example was the ongoing disputes over the city’s cultural heritage, occasionally fueled by the Allies’ direct involvement with archaeological excavations and artefacts, which caused conflicts and unease, but also collaborations, between the Allies and Ottoman cultural authorities, both in İstanbul and in Ankara (Shaw 2003; Özlü 2018; Abi 2022; Ercan Kydonakis 2022; Çekiç 2022).

Part of the structure of feeling of living under occupation was reckoning with economic hardships, homelessness, and mass unemployment. The cost of basic goods increased by 1,510 percent between July 1914 and October 1920 (Levant Trade Review, October 1920, 857). The head of the American College for Girls, Mary Mills Patrick, recounted the harrowing poverty: “Never before had I seen such wretchedness! In the streets were women and children without enough clothing to cover their bodies, their miserable rags being only patches upon patches” (Patrick 1930, 327). İstanbul became a city of refugees. The majority were escaping the aftermath of the Soviet Revolution and civil war, and joined the already displaced populations who had arrived in the city during the Balkan Wars and World War I. As one journalist noted at the time, tens of thousands of displaced people “poured” into the city “in veritable rivers of humanity,” including “Greeks, Armenians, Russians, Jews, Turks,” and most were “penniless, there to live in open streets, in camps, on the ruined walls, in huts made of boxes, in discarded army tents” (Solano 1922, 655). The housing supply could not match the demand. Recurrent fires in the mostly wooden housing stock left many more homeless, and soon it cost more to live in İstanbul “than in any other city in the world, not excepting New York” (Solano 1922, 661). The meaning of the citizenship status of many refugees was also in flux, as peace negotiations were continually redrawing borders, leaving some without a state, and many without rights or access to legal processes. The impact of these social, political, and cultural uncertainties was felt on the everyday life of İstanbullular whose situation would become increasingly precarious.

At the same time, İstanbul could also be described as “the quietest and safest place in the Near East” (Claflin Davis 1922, 203) as violence continued across Anatolia and the wider Middle East (Gingeras 2009; Kitchen 2015). For many displaced people, including artists, occupied İstanbul offered relative security and abundant opportunities to establish or re-establish themselves in what seemed to be becoming an international cultural capital. The Allied soldiers and sailors had money to spend at the city’s newly opened restaurants, theaters, and music halls. Cultural activities by the long-term and established residents were enriched and variegated by the new arrivals, among them artists and musicians who forged new identities. Many of these displaced artists became strangers in the unfamiliar occupied city, far away from their birth cities, but they also shaped the cultural life of İstanbul they made home. Art was a paid occupation to survive, but it could also be galvanized for propaganda and protest, turned to as an escape from hardships, and practiced as part of a healing process; a means of bettering one’s own life and those of others.

The scholarship in this special issue is representative of the approach to understanding how people made sense of World War I that has emerged in cultural history studies since the 1980s. The work of cultural historians, including Modris Eksteins, Annette Becker, and Jay Winter, has been among the most productive and dynamic grounds of historical research in the field of World War I studies (Eksteins 1989; Becker 1994; Winter 1995, 2017; Winter and Robert 2012). As Peter Burke has noted, however, “cultural history is best regarded not as a field with a fence around it but rather as a history written from a particular angle or viewpoint, concentrating on the symbolic element in all human activities” (Burke 2012, 7). Cultural historians’ work thus overlaps that of intellectual historians, art historians, and of social historians who, since the 1960s, have challenged grand narratives of World War I and become more involved with the histories of previously marginalized individuals both on the battle front (ordinary soldiers) and the home front (civilians). In a recent article, John Horne (2019) has asked a provocative question of whether the cultural paradigm in World War I studies has run its course. His answer suggests that cultural history can still contribute much to the understanding of “new cases or countries, especially those beyond the western front” (Horne 2019, 185). In fact, in recent years, World War I historiography has begun to see the war as a global conflict and hence broadened its focus geographically and chronologically, bringing comparative, non-Western, and colonial experiences to the forefront. It has also extended outward the chronology of the war from 1914 and 1918 to encompass the turbulent and lengthy aftermath of the war that historians now refer to as the “Greater War” (see, among others, Horne 2010; Gerwarth and Manela 2014; Gingeras 2016; Das 2018; Johnson and Kitchen 2019; Winter 2022). ⁵ An explosion of new scholarship on the Ottoman experience of World War I has also diversified the sources in historical research, seeing the war and its immediate aftermath not only through the eyes of the male Turkish ruling elite but of ordinary soldiers, civilians, women, children, and other subordinate actors (Beşikçi 2012; Tarazi-Fawaz 2014; Rogan 2015; Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Akın 2018; Maksudyan 2019; Oğuz 2021). The Greater War’s impact on cultural practices, values, and beliefs, as well as art making and cultural memory in the Empire and post-Ottoman lands, however, has yet to receive distinct attention. This issue aims to fill this gap.

Gizem Tongo and İrvin Cemil Schick’s (2024) article in this issue, “Islamic art and visualities of war from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic,” explores the changing relationship between modern warfare and the production and reception of Islamic art from the outbreak of World War I, through the War of Independence, to the nascent Republican era. The article draws on largely untapped sources and offers a close reading of selected visual material, ranging from miniature paintings to calligraphic panels and religious timetables, examining the ways in which Islamic art, its actors, and institutions were articulated, and sometimes subverted, with the experience of war between 1914 and 1924. Tongo and Schick challenge the later mythmaking about the categorization of the War of Independence as a secular and modernist movement and argue that the continuities and changes in Islamic art during this period show that the transition from the multi-ethnic Empire to the Republic was “more intricate, more gradual, and less homogeneous than it is often thought to have been.” They show us that a focus on religion is essential to understand not only the production of Islamic art but also the clashes over Islamic cultural heritage in occupied İstanbul, as well as how people made sense of war in the final years of the Empire.

Artistic production is also central to Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal’s (2024) article, “Musical convergence and divergence in occupied İstanbul, 1918–1923,” a study of musical life, performance, and production, including opera, folk music, alaturka, and jazz. The article discusses not only the songs but also the public who listened to them, as well as music as a business and as a form of collaboration and resistance. As MacArthur-Seal argues, the existence of British, French, and Italian occupying forces, refugees from the Russian Empire, and the return of Ottoman musicians who had been trained abroad had a major impact on musical practice and its reception in İstanbul between 1918 and 1923. The presence of local and international musicians and patrons allowed music and its performance to become a site of inspiration for the various civil society groups seeking to organize among the city’s political and economic difficulties. MacArthur-Seal demonstrates how music was politicized during that time either to set out national claims by different communities of the city (Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Muslims) or to organize concerts to raise money for charitable work for orphans, refugees, and the war-wounded.

Ceren Abi’s (2024) article, “‘If it is not too paradoxical’: archaeology in İstanbul under occupation as a window into understanding the creation of a post-war cultural heritage regime,” addresses the practices and strategies of dealing with cultural heritage by the Allies in the Ottoman lands in the immediate aftermath of World War I, with a specific focus on their archaeological activities undertaken in occupied İstanbul. Abi examines the conflicting motives that led the Allies to excavate, establish archaeological schools, and draft new antiquities laws. Abi’s article shows us that public opinion in Europe changed during World War I when expropriation of antiquities was seen as looting, but the nineteenth-century mentality which saw the study and protection of antiquities as signals of higher civilization persisted. In fact, as Abi illustrates, the Allies were eager to take advantage of the unprecedented access to archaeological sites and take antiquities to their countries. Even though the occupying forces differed in their approach to İstanbul’s cultural heritage, they all aimed at legitimizing their occupation and asserting their claim to “belong to the highest civilization.” Abi concludes that, between 1918 and 1923, the goal of the Allies’ cultural heritage policy was both “knowledge creation and imperial expansion,” and signaled a new cultural heritage regime in the wider Middle East.

Nilay Özlü’s (2024) “Under the shadow of occupation: cultural, archaeological, and military activities at Topkapı Palace during the armistice period, 1918–1923” examines competing claims to the royal complex and its collections by the Allies seeking to assert colonial hegemony but also by cultural and government authorities in both İstanbul and Ankara. As Özlü shows, while the French seized the military and logistic quarters of the Palace and conducted excavations on the city’s Byzantine past, the inner Palace remained under Ottoman control, and Halil Edhem, the director of the Imperial Museum, by turns collaborated, negotiated, and opposed the archeological demands of the Allied authorities. Meanwhile, the Islamic sacred relics in the Palace’s collection were the subject of disputes between the British, on behalf of their client King Hussein of the Hejaz, and the Ankara government, seeking to establish itself as a protector of Islamic and Ottoman cultural heritage. Özlü concludes that the disputes over Topkapı Palace and its collections came to an end with the victory of the Ankara government and the foundation of the Republic, after which the Palace was declared to be a national museum in 1924.

Finally, Jay Winter’s (2024) postscript describes the complex cultural framework of occupied İstanbul as “colonial in essence, though transnational in practice.” Winter places the occupied city in its regional and historical context, comparing İstanbul with other capital cities in the two world wars including Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and Cairo. As he emphasizes, “life went on” in each city under occupation, in their streets, theaters, restaurants, and schools, while refugees fled, prices rose, and residents tried to survive under a military occupation. Winter argues that there were two key differences between the approach of the occupying powers in İstanbul and that employed in other occupied regional cities like Cairo, Jerusalem, or Beirut, despite their broadly similar strategic positions, predominantly Muslim populations, and archaeological sites. Firstly, in İstanbul, the Allies did not have enough financial resources or confidence “to suppress the opposition to the colonial carve up of Anatolia they proposed in the Treaty of Sèvres.” Instead, they diverted most of their energy and resources to their existing and new colonial possessions in Africa and Asia. Secondly, there was “very little public support in Britain or in France for military action in Turkey,” while the Allies did not clearly oppose the Greek invasion of Asia Minor. And, as such, for Winter, the structure of feeling of living under occupation in İstanbul was uniquely shaped by its ambiguous and uncertain future.

Taken together, the articles in this special issue are examples of the range of new perspectives and methodologies in cultural historical writing about the late Empire, modern Middle East, and European imperialism during the Greater War. By analyzing cultural practices such as visual art, music, and cultural heritage, we attempted, at the human scale, to give a sense of the diverse lived experiences of individual actors and their entangled and mutually transformative relationships with dominant, residual, and emerging cultural meanings and values and, at the level of metanarrative, to ask larger historical questions about colonialism, identity, and nationalism. Future directions of the research agenda suggested here include explorations of cultural practice, policy, and heritage beyond İstanbul in other occupied post-Ottoman cities and regions in the period. And yet there remains much more to say about the new art styles and forms, including avant-garde and modernist experiments in painting, literature, and cinema, that emerged in this largely occluded period of İstanbul’s cultural history.

It is now more than a century since World War I and the occupations of İstanbul and other Ottoman heartlands came to an end, but our contemporary moment is still fraught in part by the legacies of this history. As wars and occupations continue in different parts of the world, as we witness more destruction and looting of cultural heritage, and as many displaced artists find themselves strangers in new cities, we hope that recovering this occluded history can be a resource for the will to survive, resist, and touch the lives of others through arts, music, scholarship, and solidarity.